Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Vernor Vinge - A Deepness Upon the Sky

So high, so low, so many things to know. (p.
775)

A Deepness in the Sky is the prequel to his
fantastic, Hugo winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep. But unlike most prequels, A Deepness in the
Sky doesn't blandly putter about the backdrop or spend its time retconning
with sledgehammer subtlety. Though we are exploring Pham Nuwen's history, we're
doing so in a fashion far enough removed from the earlier (/chronologically
later) novel that A Deepness in the Sky has
space to become its own story. In fact, the closest connection between the two
is thematic, with A Deepness in the Sky presenting
a claustrophobic counterpoint to the mind-boggling expanses of its predecessor.

A Deepness in the Sky is a book of
humanity constrained. By the time of its occurrence, humankind has grown far
beyond what we can now imagine, but true greatness – the ends of misery and
suffering, the permanence of civilization and justice – remain out of reach,
nothing more than impossibilities and "Failed Dreams" (p. 323). We've
learned much through all these thousands of future years, but mainly we've learned of limits (p. 770). Unable to go beyond the speed of
light, no culture can survive between planets and systems, and so planetary civilizations rise and fall. At
the height they're wonderful things, but there is so much darkness. (p.
770) No matter how great a civilization may grow, it cannot be eternal. A Fire Upon the Deep showed a path of
potential and nigh endless ascension, of mobility and transcendence if only one
could overcome the dangers. A Deepness in
the Sky, taking place entirely within what that other novel would call the
Slow Zone, has the rises and falls without the possibility of growth or
apotheosis. It shows humanity endlessly struggling against the "wheel of
time" (323) and humanity being endlessly broken upon it.

It is this
inevitability that the outsider, planet-born Pham Nuwen strives against. He
dreams of a single Humankind, where
justice would not be occasional flickering light, but a steady glow across all
of Human Space. He dreamed of a civilization where continents never burned. (pp. 556-7) Motivated
by that dream, Nuwen approaches the disparate Qeng Ho trading culture and tries
to meld them into a unifying force. But his dreams prove impossible. Mere
organization is not enough; humankind is fundamentally outmatched by time and space.

Outmatched within
its own boundaries, that is, for the novel's main action takes place far past
the establishment of this cycle of rises and falls, takes place as humankind
reaches something utterly alien: the On/Off star (which emits no heat at all
for 215 of every 250 years) and, on the one planet that orbits it, the Spiders,
a nonhuman technological race. Then there's the fact that the Qeng Ho expedition
to this star is not the only one. The Emergents have also arrived, a disparate human
civilization that possesses its own dark secrets and strengths.

After their
so ominous introduction, it's not that surprising when the Emergents prove
villainous and betray the Qeng Ho they'd pretended to coexist with. The Qeng Ho
expedition must not only struggle to survive under the Emergent's tyranny but
also, in Pham Nuwen's case, struggle to find a way to finally overcome the
necessity of these endless and unwinnable life and death struggles. Nuwen,
though, is not the only one striving.

Nuwen's counterpart
in the space borne part of the story is Tomas Nau, the Emergent's leader, who has
reached his own solution with the aid of Focus, an Emergent science that allows
once-free individuals to be turned into hyper efficient slaves. This
transcendence through cruelty is efficient, allowing not only short term
miracles but also the long term coordination and stability that would be needed
to truly enact the kind of justice and greatness throughout space that Nuwen
envisions. But, though he's initially drawn to use of the Focused, Nuwen eventually
realizes that the cost is too high and that any utopia created with such
inhumanity at its center is not worthy of its own immortality.

The far
opposite of Nau's practicality only approach might be Sherkaner Underhill's.
Sherkaner's one of the sentient spider-like creatures that the whole story
revolves around, but his role isn't that of a prize passively sitting by while
his betters fight over him. No, Sherkaner's busy with his mad ideas, playing
the role of the resident and eccentric mad genius, spouting out a thousand flights
of brilliancy and fancy a second and then moving on before they're all the way
out of his mouth, a tireless flirting around what might just be possible
without ever letting the difficulties of reality in, a job that falls those
around him to face in order to make use of his mind.

It is,
eventually, something like Sherkaner's method that triumphs. No matter how well
meaning or ruthless we are, Vinge shows us that we alone are not enough to
triumph over time, fate, and inevitability. No, for that we need technology and
an endless search for what is possible. In the end, the On/Off star doesn't give
Pham Nuwen the answers, but it does show him that answers are not impossible,
and, as readers of A Fire Upon the Deep
know, that is eventually enough to get him (and all of us?) the rest of the
way. As Nuwen himself puts it, "We've
finally found something from outside
all our limits. It's a tiny glimpse, shreds and drags of brightest glory."
(p. 770)

Tying into
all this is actually the question of classification. I've seen A Deepness in the Sky often called Hard
Science Fiction. That's, well, rather bizarre. Let me remind you, oh venerable
and impossible to pin down internet classifiers, that this is a novel that
contains a star that turns itself off every once in a while and genuine
antigravity, to name just the two most obvious case-breakers. My point here
goes beyond simple quibbling with genres, though. A Deepness in the Sky is not a work grounded in the current trends
of scientific thought, and one could go so far as to say that that's the entire
point of it. This is not a novel about what we know, but rather about what we
don't know, and Vinge is damn careful throughout to divorce it from the strict
boundaries of 21st century plausibility. As such, and making full
use of Clarke's third law and all that goes with it, Vinge makes frequent references
to the "magic" of such incomprehensible things things, be they the
On/Off star (p. 197), the previous and inconceivably advanced prior dwellers on
Arachna (p. 254), or even Focus technology (p. 294). There's even a mention of
the Weird (which, though this is certainly not Horror in either its methods or
its mindset, is a rather related field) in the form of a reference to your typical Cthulhonic horror (p. 297).

But, my
thousand plus word reveling in Vinge's fascinating thematic arc now past,
there's also a story here, and, though I've no doubt done my inadvertent best
to convince you otherwise with all my blathering, it's not a pretentious one at
all. At its best, it's fantastic. Vinge plots like a hunting hound given
flight, free to go anywhere he can imagine and downright damned if he won't
explore ever interesting nook, cranny, and consequence of what he's dreamed up.
But there are flaws, too, and some are, alas, quite grievous. In my review of A Fire Upon the Deep, I said that "Vinge’s
characters, and even his plots, are well overshadowed by his ideas"and that "once just about all’s
explained and understood […] a bit of the excitement leaves the affair." In
A Deepness in the Sky, we, alas,
reach that point far sooner, a likely result of the novel being far more
stationary, with much less stage space, and so running out of new and totally
out there sights to throw at us far sooner. Once that point's reached, and with
the exception of Pham Nuwen's flashbacks, things are up to the plotting and the
characters. And things don't go nearly as well.

Once its
fantastic opening is done, and once we've settled into its middle section, A Deepness in the Sky proceeds to trudge
along for a truly incredible amount of time. There is a climax coming, of
course, but we know roughly what shape it'll take from a quarter or a third of
the way through, and the vast majority of the character's actions aren't so
much bringing it about as they are talking about what they'll do when it hits
them of its own volition. This idle and often almost eventless pacing is highlighted
by the timescale. Years and years pass over the novel's course, which just
seems to turn the character's profitless determination and motionless
enthusiasm into, well, nothing at all. Then there's the bewildering way that so
many of the novel's intermediate game changers happen entirely off screen and
are only alluded to in passing. This is bad aboard the ships, where we spend
the majority of our time, but is far worse on the Spiders' world of Arachna,
where gaps and skips leave the villain developing somewhere totally out of view
and inconsequential feeling and, because of it, undefined by anything but
uninteresting blanket statements like Whatever
was evil, Pedure was very good at it. (p. 583)

Characters
in general prove, if not a problem, not exactly a strength. Like in A Fire Upon the Deep, they're wholly
ruled by the forces around them, but here there are long periods where none of
those forces are particularly evident and we're left with not much but the
characters themselves sitting around. Vinge is decent at creating believable
and realistic individuals, but, whether by design or by virtue of falling short,
the reader never comes to grow close to any of them. This works for characters
like Pham Nuwen and Sherkaner Underhill, both of which are too much larger than
life and to scheming to serve as easy points of reader identification, but it
does end up leaving the work without any real emotional center, with a bunch of
characters that make certainly well realized minor characters but none that the
reader ever truly lives through.

Despite
these flaws, though, A Deepness in the
Sky is a stunning and expansive read. It's not quite as breathtaking or simply
excellent as its predecessor, but it still does show off Vinge's skill and
imagination, still stretches out and smashes (delightful!) holes in your
imagination. Though A Fire Upon the Deep
and A Deepness in the Sky are
separate enough to be read individually, their combined effect shows both the
possibilities for greatness and for disaster in the author's vision of the
future, and each is a daring and powerful work of Science Fiction. Put in order, the two show a probable arc for technology's progress. Most of this novel is a seemingly endless stagnation that follows that technology's brief arrival, but just because the answers are hard to find does not mean that they are not there, and Vinge seems sure that technology will eventually able us to succeed at our most fundamental goals.

2 comments:

I had a lot of difficulty in actually finishing this book, and ended up skimming most of the last 200 pages or so.

The Pham Nuwen back-story, where he travels across the stars with the Qeng Ho and plans his empire, greatly overshadowed the main storyline. Greatest of all was the tone that Vinge managed to capture - he managed to make a civilization spread across dozens of worlds, with regular interstellar travel actually seem claustrophobic, something I've never seen another author pull off in SF.

...Who?

I spend my free time reading and writing. In addition to assorted other content, I'll be posting a book review every Tuesday. I have also published a fair few stories, a complete list of which can be found here. If you want to get in contact with me for any reason, feel free to email me at nskteh[at]gmail[dot]com.